MealRec: A Meal Recommendation Dataset

Bundle recommendation systems aim to recommend a bundle of items for a user to consider as a whole. They have become a norm in modern life and have been applied to many real-world settings, such as product bundle recommendation, music playlist recommendation and travel package recommendation. However, compared to studies of bundle recommendation approaches in areas such as online shopping and digital music services, research on meal recommendations for restaurants in the hospitality industry has made limited progress, due largely to the lack of high-quality benchmark datasets. A publicly available dataset specialising in meal recommendation research for the research community is in urgent demand. In this paper, we introduce a meal recommendation dataset (MealRec) that aims to facilitate future research. MealRec is constructed from the user review records of Allrecipe.com, covering 1,500+ users, 7,200+ recipes and 3,800+ meals. Each recipe is described with rich information, such as ingredients, instructions, pictures, category and tags, etc; and each meal is three-course, consisting of an appetizer, a main dish and a dessert. Furthermore, we propose a category-constrained meal recommendation model that is evaluated through comparative experiments with several state-of-the-art bundle recommendation methods on MealRec. Experimental results confirm the superiority of our model and demonstrate that MealRec is a promising testbed for meal recommendation related research. The MealRec dataset and the source code of our proposed model are available at https://github.com/WUT-IDEA/MealRec for access and reproducibility.